Jive Talker
'An African memoir unlike any other I have read… Filled with wonder, humour and hope. It is a magnificent achievement' Aminatta Forna, Sunday Telegraph
A uniquely vivid and wickedly funny memoir of growing up ambitious, creative and sometimes hungry in Malawi. With exuberant prose, a cast of extraordinary characters and a rebellious spirit, Samson Kambalu tells the story of how a little boy obsessed with fashion, football, Nietzsche and Michael Jackson won a free education at the Kamuzu Academy ('The Eton of Africa') and began his journey to art school and artistic success.
The son of a philosophising, hard-drinking, poorly paid hospital manager, Kambalu's award-winning conceptual work is shown in galleries across the world, and still evokes that childhood landscape of literary excitement, family chaos and music; post-colonial injustice, poverty and Aids.
Samson Kambalu was born in 1975 in Malawi. He lives and works in Oxford where he is an Associate Professor of Fine Art and a lifelong fellow at Magdalen College, Oxford University. Kambalu is an artist and writer working in a variety of media, including site-specific installation, video, performance and literature. Kambalu has won research fellowships with Yale University and the Smithsonian Institution. His work Antelope appeared on Trafalgar Square's Fourth Plinth in 2022.